Taking politics into account helps craft effective recycling message

Everybody will be relatively environmentally friendly with the right message.

Recently we covered some research that suggested pro-environment messages don't just fall on deaf ears when it comes to people on the conservative end of the political spectrum (and even some moderates)—pro-environment messages actively discourage those people from making decisions they'd otherwise be perfectly content with. So, what happens if you actually want to convince people to do something good for the environment, like recycling? Is it terminally hopeless?

Not according to research that's being published by the Journal of Consumer Research. The work focused on the fact that some messages resonate more with political conservatives, and others messages resonate with liberals. By targeting the pro-recycling message in those terms, the authors managed to change real-world behavior based on measurements of the amount of material recycled by families. Once the message was received, the generally positive attitude towards environmentally friendly actions spilled over into other areas.

The work was based on past studies that showed people's political leanings tie into other areas of their personality. To grossly oversimplify, conservatives tend to favor maintaining loyalty to the cultural groups they belong to and feel a strong sense of duty to those groups. Liberals, in contrast, tend to focus more on their feelings about what's ethical and fair and make decisions based on that. So, the researchers reasoned, it should be possible to take a single activity—recycling, in this case—and craft messages that resonate with these different groups.

To take some specific examples they used, the authors' messages to conservatives included phrases that focused on duty and authority (“do our civic duty because recycling is the responsible thing to do in our society” and “follow the advice of important leaders”). They also emphasized group membership by suggesting people could join in recycling “with those like you in your community.”

The messages designed for liberals focused on things like the general good and reducing harm (“care for others and allow the greatest good to come to our society” and “reduce the harm to others and to the environment”). But they were couched within language that suggested the liberals could personally recognize what was best for society, with messages like “because you know it’s the right thing to do."

As is typical for these sorts of studies, the authors recruited a small horde of undergrads and had them answer questions that provided a sense of their political leanings. With those established, the researchers then showed them a message that was tailored to the group that the subjects appeared to belong to. (A control group got a neutral message; there's no indication what message any moderates got.) When that was done, the students were asked about their feelings towards recycling. In general, most of these questions were placed in a context that was intended to obscure what the study might be trying to determine.

As you might expect, the results were consistent with what we know about the personalities associated with political leanings. Compared to the neutral messages that served as a control, the messages intended to appeal to specific political leanings worked; the people who got them felt more positively about recycling at the end. And if someone was given a mistargeted message, it simply ended up having about the same impact as a neutral message.

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Further studies of this sort suggested that the effect was simply a matter of fluency, meaning that people were aware that recycling was considered valuable in some way and responded positively to it. And the authors showed that the positive feelings towards one pro-environmental activity spilled over into others. People reported that they intended to buy compact fluorescent lightbulbs and save water after the recycling message was received, provided it was couched in language that appealed to them.

If the work had ended there, it probably wouldn't be worth reporting on. But the authors went a significant step further: they checked for whether the self-reported feelings translated to any change in real-world behavior. 500 households in Lexington Kentucky were sent a survey on the head of household's political leanings, and asked to participate in a program where their recycling habits would be tracked. 113 of them agreed. For five weeks, the amount of material they recycled was tracked to establish a baseline. Then, the participants got a politically tailored recycling message, after which habits were tracked for another nine weeks.

It worked. The households that received a neutral recycling message saw their rates drop from the baseline slightly, as did the people who received a message that was tailored to the wrong group. But those who got an appeal targeted to their political leanings actually increased the amount of material they recycled after the appeal was made. (Sadly, there was no attempt to check water usage and see if the spillover effect existed in the real world.)

Aside from the small sample size, which was probably inevitable in a study that's this involved, the work has a few weaknesses, most of which the authors recognize. For example, there was no way to tell if the person who filled out the political survey was the same as the person who received the recycling message (assuming the message was read)—or if that person had the ultimate say over what went in the recycling bins.

The other issue is that the authors consistently compared a politically targeted message to a control message. The good news is that mistargeting the message (like giving a conservative the text intended for a liberal) didn't seem to make matters worse. The earlier study we covered, however, suggested that giving a conservative any sort of environmental message might be enough to cause them to do less recycling. This study doesn't make clear whether that might be an issue here or not.

The study at least suggests that it might be possible to get everyone on board with environmental messages, provided that the message is couched in the appropriate terms. And if the message goes to the wrong audience, it doesn't appear to do any harm.